Bit Torrent Issues: Can anyone help me figure out what's what?

Okay, so here's the story. I bought a new Linksys WRT54G router, and I'm hardwired into the router. I like to bit torrent a lot (mostly new anime shows), so I found a guide online about how to do Port Forwarding to open ports up for downloading.

For the first week it's absolutely fantastic. It works right away, and almost everything I download is downloading at 200-300K speeds for just about every file I download. Suddenly this week, it's back down to virtually nothing (5-10K at most) and I can't figure out what happened. I checked my router and the settings are still in place. I haven't installed any new programs, I don't have my Windows Firewall up or any other 3rd party firewall, so I have no idea what gives. Anyone have any ideas as to what could have happened to suddenly kick my download speeds to the toilet?

Oh, and for reference, this ONLY affects my bit torrent. My internet speed is fine for everything else (with the occasional lag).

Jam it back in, in the dark.

It's not just that the torrents you're grabbing now aren't very well seeded?

How ya doing, buddy?

When I downloaded Gundam 00 last week, the rate was about 250K, this week it was about 3-4K. I highly doubt that many people dropped the show after one week. :-(

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

If the computer you're using a torrent client on has a dynamic local IP from the router, that would explain this. Port forwarding really only works at all with a static IP. If your router supports it, you should go with UP&P instead. That's the same deal, but fully automatic.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I never knew that. Looking at the router it has an IP of 192.68.*.*, but when I check the Router status it says 68.***.51.*** (blacking out random numbers for safety). Is this what you mean?

If so, how can I check if my router supports UP&P? When I look at the port forwarding options (set to "both" at the moment) the two in question are TCP and UDP. How would I set something like this up?

I was speaking idiomatically.

Usually your router assigns the computers on the network an IP, starting with 192.168.0.100, and then 192.168.0.101 for the next, and so on. If one disconnects and reconnects, it may not get the same IP the next time it connects.

In your router settings, you can sometimes set a 'DHCP reservation'. For example, my computer is set to ALWAYS connect as 192.168.0.136.

If your router doesn't do that itself, you can change your connection settings to do it. Instructions for that can be found here.

After that, make sure the proper port is forwarded to that particular IP that you set for yourself.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?

I'm going to have to explain a few things to you from scratch. I'll speak in simple terms and assume you know nothing about the topic at hand. I don't mean to be insulting, but lets get some basics down here.

There is a difference between "public" IP addresses and "private" IP addresses. Certain IP ranges are set aside for "private" use. They can only refer to a computer on the local network. If the "private" IP address of your router is 192.168.0.1 that means you can access it at that address, from your own network. Nobody else can access it on that address, because it is "private" to your network.

The "private" ranges are:

10.0.0.0 – 10.255.255.255
172.16.0.0 – 172.31.255.255
192.168.0.0 – 192.168.255.255

You can't make a remote connection to any of these addresses. Nobody can. They refer to local machines. If you have anything connected to your home network, it will be using an IP from this range. To reveal it doesn't offer any useful information to a hacker, or to a helper.

In order to make remote connections to the rest of the internet, you also have a "public" IP address. This is assigned by your ISP, and in your case is the "68.*.51.*" address that you've partially obfuscated there. That allows the rest of the internet to connect to the device you use as a modem. This IP address does reveal a moderate amount of useful information, but you're giving it out every time you connect to a webpage. That's how TCP/IP networking (AKA: the internet) works. As long as you have a firewall, it is safe (but unnecessary) to divulge that information.

In your case you are using a router to connect to the internet. A router is typically a small linux machine with a built in network switch, wireless access point and DSL modem. This allows you to link up your other PCs by either wired or wireless connections and share your DSL internet through the whole household.

Since your ISP only assigns you one public IP address, a little bit of magic known as Network Address Translation (NAT) is required in order to allow your various PCs to make remote connections. All that this really means is that your router distributes the incoming "packets" of data to the various private IPs on your network. This causes a problem when using bittorent because:

Quote:

Services that require the initiation of TCP connections from the outside network, or stateless protocols such as those using UDP, can be disrupted.

The solution is port forwarding. I've gone the long way around to explain this because I believe it is good to understand things to at least some degree if one is going to use them.

Now I can get to practical matters. Each computer on your network has a private IP address, and you can find out what it is by typing "ipconfig" at the Windows command prompt. You can launch the Windows command prompt with Start->Run->cmd.

Quite often, a new installation of Windows will be set up to use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), which allows the router to automatically assign an IP address to each DHCP client. That is fine for most purposes, but for port forwarding, you need your private IP to remain the same.

Open the properties page for your network connection. You will find your network connection at Start->Settings->Network Connections and then right-click and select "Properties". If you're using a mouse set up for the left hand, that's a left-click, of course.

Select the "Use the following IP address:" radio button and enter some numbers. For your "IP address", use the first three digits of your router's address (often 192.168.0) and pick anything you like as the last digit as long as it is not greater than 255. For your "subnet mask", it is almost always "255.255.255.0" and I won't bore you any further by explaining about subnetworks. Your "Default gateway" should be the address of your router. Finally your "Preferred DNS server" should also be the same as the address of your router. Typically a router will forward the DNS data from your ISP to each computer.

Now you have a static private IP for your torrent client to work with, so you can set up port forwarding. Without knowing what make and model of router you have it is hard to give exact details but what you need is an IP address to forward to, and a port number (or range of port numbers) to forward. You might need to specify a "local port" and a "remote port", or something along those lines. They should be the same. The IP address should be the one you chose earlier.

I suspect that what happened here is that you set up port forwarding, and then your computer got assigned a new private IP address after you reset, or something along those lines. It should work fine now. If it doesn't, what you have is an issue unrelated to port forwarding, and I wasted your time making you read this long post. My apologies should that be the case.

I recommend that you use μTorrent, since I know that it has a simple method to tell if your ports are forwarded properly. You can always test that before trying anything from the rest of my post.

As for UPnP I don't know how exactly you would find out, except to browse through the router config looking for anything under "advanced" settings. It works spectacularly well with μTorrent, and I don't bother to configure port forwarding any more.

Sorry to be so verbose, but I want to make sure you understand what I'm suggesting, so that you can dismiss the suggestion if you know I'm wrong.

FELIPE NO

Thank you all for this information. I will do my best to create a static IP for my ports to go to. If it doesn't work, than it's something else I imagine. :-)

Additional Spam:
Sadly it didn't work. It must be something else

Evidence:

http://www.studio-zel.com/images/downloadspeed.jpg

The second torrent is the new Bleach episode that just came out. I just can't seem to get a good connection anymore. Is there something else I may have overlooked? Do both computers on the network need to have static IPs, or just mine?

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Sure you're just not on a slow torrent?

Try hopping on this torrent, see how it goes.

Also, do you use Comcast?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

What is this I'm downloading exactly? ^^

And right now it's running about the same speed as the others. Hovering around 9k though, so that's a little faster...

I guess it must be something else. Some other setting that I'm missing.

EDIT: I use Charter Broadband internet

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by RurouniZel

The second torrent is the new Bleach episode that just came out. I just can't seem to get a good connection anymore. Is there something else I may have overlooked? Do both computers on the network need to have static IPs, or just mine?

Just the one you are using for torrents. As long as the port forwarding options are pointing to a static IP on the computer you use for torrents, everything should be fine.

To judge from the screenshot you sent, you've set up your port forwarding correctly now. There is nothing like a test, though. Download and install µTorrent, if you can. Start your torrent, and next to the connection speeds is a little icon indicating whether your ports are properly forwarded. If it stays red or yellow, you may have a problem. If it goes green, you're good. It can take a few minutes to go green though...

If this doesn't help, then it could just be a slow torrent, or some other issue. I've actually heard that Charter do use traffic shaping, which will definitely limit your download speed on torrents. It sucks, but that's what some ISPs have resorted to to curb bandwidth usage.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

Just my opinion, but utorrent sucks up too much processing speed for me. Same with G2torrent or whatever it's called. I stick with the somewhat traditional torrent program BitTornado. It doesn't guzzle up as much processing speed, so you can do other stuff, you can set the ports, and it has a big glaring light that shows you whether or not your connected correctly, especially through a router/ports. BitTornado

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?